If you've been hanging around here for a while you know that I haven't been impressed with Alexa's ranking system. It doesn't seem to be a true indicator of the traffic that you are actually receiving to the site and it's hard to decipher (0.002% of what exactly?). The Alexa ranking for this site is way better for this site than for my wife's and yet she is getting a lot more traffic.

So I set out to find a service like Alexa that can give me a comparison of what my traffic is to other sites. Jack Keifer recommended Compete. So I gave it a run through. It gave some caveats that it didn't have much information, so the results weren't guaranteed but they nailed it for all of my sites.

Compete actually uses a scientific method to guessing traffic numbers. From their website:

Compete estimates site traffic and engagement metrics based on the daily browsing activity of over 2,000,000 U.S. Internet users. Compete applies a rigorous normalization methodology, leveraging scientific multi-dimensional scaling (by age, income, gender and geography) to ensure metrics are representative of the U.S. Internet population. Compete members are recruited through multiple sources, including ISPs, the Compete Toolbar and additional opt-in panels to ensure a diverse distribution of user types and to facilitate de-biasing across the data sources.

Sounds like they know what they're doing doesn't it? I like that about them. I don't like that Alexa only gets it's number from one source - it's toolbar. The single source just opens it up to being drasitcally skewed for certain businesses or for people who encourage their readers to install the Alexa toolbar.Considering Compete were accurate on my stat's and they gather information from multiple sources, I am definitely thinking that they are a much better alternative to Alexa. I also like the fact that you can create "Views" that allow you to compare 5 sites against each other, I am planning on using for sites that I frequently want to see a comparison of.

You can pick up their toolbar and start getting more accurate traffic estimates for the sites you visit:

Compete Toolbar

Popularity: 10% [?]

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